„What do you need the definitions for? They are anyhow just a half of the truth. If you really will, it is the work of a man who is not aware of what he’s doing. Can you imagine that a man who spends his whole life in a mental institution can create a masterpiece? You ask yourself: How come? It’s a drive even a normal person isn’t aware of. The elements of spontaneity and immediacy make every man express himself. No matter in what way. Dubuffet made a collection also of madmen’s texts. It’s an extraordinary language. With Art brut, we want to affirm that each one of us is a potential painter, poet, musician, and that everyone can create a good painting, a good verse or a good musical note. One just has to find the right moment for it and be brave. For me, Art brut is a living space, perpetual excitement. One cannot approach that art with pedagogic prejudices: as what drives or messages are. It’s pure spontaneity, exuberance, lunacy, as you wish”.*

„Surrealism has never captured me. Me and Breton had some meeting points, but also many differences. I didn’t fit in with Breton’s surrealistic gospel”.*
“Normally, I don’t like the word – professionally – profession is something which deforms you. A painter who is a professional, he is, I think, a lost man. Painting, it is like breathing. You work because you have to, because it makes you happy and, as for a painful childbirth, I don’t know of it”.**

“I tell you, that was a beautiful school and, today, I’m still thinking and envying those friends of mine who were that lucky, because, in other schools, the treatment was completely different. There, the professor would be one who would teach you how to hold your paintbrush, would teach you how to look at things and would endeavour to be a teacher. And I think that there is no place for such tutorship in art. I think that a man, finally that is the whole Art Brut theory – the less he knows and the less he’s skilled, the more sincere and fairer and to be himself he would be. One can learn anything. The school, as any school, trains you to a certain point to be a good technician, to learn how you should work, how you should mix, how to spread colour and all that, but it isn’t enough. I even think that it is bad”.***

“(Dubuffet) He was a man who, at that time, was the head of the revolution, he was the one who started applying all those ideas, all those anti-academic ideas, that painting doesn’t have to be engaged and that it doesn’t have to be a result of some heavy knowledge and reflections. Thanks to our first quest for the truth, the Art Brut collection was born; you know what Art Brut is, although you call it ugly art, raw art. It is an attempt to find things which people, who are far from every cultural centre, who don’t know what a museum is, who don’t know what art is, who don’t know what an exhibition is, do and who do it always out of their personal drive and needs. Sometimes, it happens that it lasts an entire life, on occasions it lasts 6 months, but those are always so fresh, so deep and so visually perfect things that one has to admit and say that one can be free only in this way, unattached and distanced from all that this civilisation of ours offers us, with all its possibilities, where every day they programme and condition us with how to spend the day. It is the only healthy and the only important and, I believe, the only one which is entitled to be called art. For all those others, I wouldn’t use that name”.***

“I never, or seldom say, that I’m a painter, because I think that it means nothing. And when I say it, I say that I sometimes paint, but that in itself, it is completely wrongly set. Because, a painter is a person who completed the art academy, left with a diploma; it is a person who was set, to whom they started building a small halo around his head and he has that same halo in the street, he carries it at home and everywhere he goes. This halo is already present and the whole life revolves around making it shine as strongly as possible, being richer and dazzling others. This halo means a guaranteed income. This is exactly what bothers me, that to paint, you have to have and make a circle of people around you who will do it and who will, eventually, succeed in making your life easier, allow you to find a beefsteak more easily, pay more easily for it and to bring it home. And this is why I believe that, in that sense, an artist is mistaken, that’s to say, he isn’t mistaken, but puts himself into the position of being subjugated. He has to find that circle of people, must captivate those people with what he creates or let those people captivate him by their wishes, and then he becomes an instrument, he does what a person before him wants of him. So, I think that, in that sense, an artist loses the first trace of freedom and then that halo and that chase for that halo, it is what lies in human nature and, finally, it is not that only bread and wine or bread and milk are important; what is also important is a large apartment, wallpaper is important, northern light is important. So those wishes and those compromises increase from day to day and, in the end, one loses himself and becomes less his own. One would say, becomes, if he is at all lucky and smart, what before was a painter, that’s to say, he’s the document of his time, he has is nothing else to say, he only copies what he sees and serves it to us”.***

“Certain painters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance had their painters who finished the work for them and who, according to their model, repaired paintings. These are those technicians and they were, most probably, much more talented painters than us who come from the academy today. Today’s Kodak is the one which will picture our reality, record it, for what’s to come. Today, everything is written down, recorded, that moment has no longer any sense. A painter today doesn’t have to and mustn’t be any longer the painter of that reality. Let him turn around, let him become something else, let him sing, go mad, let it be the echo of his being”.***

“Picasso was the first to say: “Open the windows!”. I’m adding that it is not enough. Open your windows and doors and not only open but smash the glass, as windows and doors can be closed, that’s why they need to be smashed”.***
“When I started, we had approximately 200 or 300 documents and, after 35 years, we had around 5 thousand in a large collection and equally so in the collection which houses those of Art Brut since its existence, since there were exhibitions, since it was written about and since we published our periodicals, which now continue to be issued in Switzerland. The world started acquainting with it, the world started being interested in it and everything today that is a little bit outside of some norms, all that smells a little bit of something that is revolutionary, obtains this label Art Brut. So that, actually, there is, thanks to the critics and people who write, a danger of the Art Brut school being created, because, it was concluded, I believe that it’s a way to find solutions for this unfortunate moment, when we no longer know where we’re going, when we are, headless and madly, looking for new paths”.***
*Mirko Galić; Second reading – Talks, Matica Hrvatska, Zagreb 2007
**Antun Babić – Life and Work of Slavko Kopac, printed by Zebra, Vinkovci, 2005
***Interview from 8th of August 1984 for the radio show Meetings and Acquaintances